A. Technical Field
The present invention pertains generally to data processing and display, and relates more particularly to generating and displaying active reports.
B. Background of the Invention
Effective and efficient data management is an important objective for modern business enterprises and other organizations. A key aspect of data management is providing a variety of users with access to widely distributed sources of enterprise data. One strategy for providing this access is to develop a set of data reporting tools that present data to multiple sets of users based on their specific usability requirements.
In one example, enterprise users involved in Information Technology (IT) system management must monitor and perform analysis on large amounts of system performance data being collected from the IT system platform. Much of this data is collected and stored so that analyses can be performed to identify current as well as historical system performance trends. Providing access to clear and complete data reports improves the quality of the analyses. Distributing data reports to users at different locations within the organization provides more efficient collaboration and improved user productivity.
System data from an IT infrastructure may be collected and presented to users in stand-alone data reports. Examples of collected system data reports include diagnostic data reports, performance tuning data reports, and real time application testing data reports. Stand-alone reports may be accessed by users who are connected to the data storage and receive live updates of the systems data and/or accessed by users (such as tech support personnel and application developers) who are not connected to the data storage and cannot receive live updates of the data. Additionally, stand-alone reports may be used to complement system data being collected in real time by system administration software applications, because stand-alone reports enable access to system data which are often transient, such as quality assurance (QA) runs, in-memory performance data, and system workload statistics.
Typically, stand-alone data reports are formatted for display as plain text or formatted as a static Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document. A stand-alone data report having this type of formatting may then be transmitted to a user and rendered for display within a web browser, text application, or other application that is local to the user without requiring additional specialized software. FIGS. 1A and 1B depicts a screen shot of a browser view of an exemplary prior art data report that represents data collected during execution of a create index SQL statement. The report has been formatted as a static HTML document for display as a set of tables representing overall parameters of the execution event 120, global statistics of system performance activity 130, parallel execution details 140 (this query was executed on a grid IT platform), and SQL plan execution details 150.
Despite providing more display features than a plain text format, a data report formatted as an HTML document has limitations. HTML does not include built-in support for graphics (such as charts and interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) widgets), so a data report formatted as a single HTML document typically is displayed as a single static page in like manner to FIG. 1. This type of display has usability limitations, such as being difficult for a user to discover data trends or to interact with the display in order to view related information about selected subsets of the report data. Adding features, such as an interactive interface, that improve the usability of a static HTML document by making it an active report typically requires explicitly incorporating additional non-HTML entities such as images, scripts, or graphics code such as an Adobe Flash Small Web Format (SWF) file. These incorporated entities must either be available locally, embedded in the HTML file, or provided along with the HTML file as additional files and directories in order to display the additional features when the document is rendered. The additional non-HTML entities associated with an HTML file may increase the size of data to be transported, limiting the portability of the file. Additional local configuration requirements for users viewing a file may limit accessibility of the file.
In addition, the same set of collected data may be accessed in real time by a user via the interactive GUI of a Rich Internet Application (RIA), as well as be accessed via a static display of a stand-alone data report. A user accessing the same set of collected data may be required to learn both display presentation formats since the look and feel of the two display presentations are different. This user knowledge requirement limits user productivity and adds resource cost to an enterprise system.